Evolutionary programming based optimal power flow and its validation for deregulated power system analysis

Optimal power flow (OPF) has been widely used in power system operation and planning. In deregulated environment of power sector, it is of increasing importance, for determination of electricity prices and also for congestion management. The classical methods are usually confirmed to specific cases of the OPF and do not offer great freedom in objective functions or the types of constraints that may be used. With a non-monotonic solution surface, classical methods are highly sensitive to starting points and frequently converge to local optimal solution or diverge altogether. This paper describes an efficient evolutionary programming based optimal power flow and compares its results with well known classical methods, in order to prove its validity for present deregulated power system analysis. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.